Expert Answers Psychedelics Questions From Twitter (ft. Michael Pollan) | Tech Support | WIRED

trippyhippie asks what if lsd connects your brain to other dimensions and planes around you yeah what if maybe it does maybe it did with your brain hi i'm michael pollan author of this is your mind on plants today i'm here to answer your questions on twitter this is psychedelic's support [Music] at alfred romero asks how does lsd work it's a great question and we know part of the answer but not the whole thing lsd is a molecule that is shaped a lot like serotonin serotonin is a very important neurotransmitter involved with mood and a whole lot of other things there are receptors in your brain that are configured to receive serotonin and as it happens the lsd molecule fits into those receptors even more tightly or perfectly than serotonin itself that's one of the reasons that lsd lasts so long because it just fits so snugly into that receptor it is an agonist in other words it makes that receptor do something rather than inhibit from doing something but beyond that we don't really know there's a cascade of effects from the time we've activated those receptors to the changes in perception and consciousness that people experience you would be amazed how little we understand about how the brain works at carbon buns i'm never going to try lsd what if it triggers some freak reaction and erases my memories or completely rewrites my brain i don't know of any cases where that has actually happened there are certainly people who have had psychotic breaks on a psychedelic many experiences can can lead can trigger schizophrenia but psychedelics are one of them so the fear of going crazy is definitely out there and it's why many people avoid psychedelics it doesn't happen very often but if it happens once that's a big problem at angel core 3 asks how do i avoid having a bad trip in the research trials that have been going on for the last couple years they will give you some really helpful advice they call them the flight instructions this is what they tell you before your trip begins if you feel like you're going crazy dying melting dissolving don't fight it go with it surrender relax your mind and float downstream as john lennon famously said even with that good advice there are scary things that may happen you may confront dark things about yourself you may confront trauma and i think people have to understand going in that that's part of the deal and that's why a guided experience is so important that there's somebody with you to hold your hand through those hard times and even more important that there's someone to talk it through afterwards help you process it interpret it i ain't no whiz kid asks what is ego death and why do you all want so bad so eco death is the experience that some people have on a high dose of psychedelics where they feel their sense of self absolutely crumble i had an experience once myself where i saw myself and i know this sounds weird because who's doing the seeing explode in a cloud of post-it notes that then came fell to the ground and spread out in this coat of blue paint and i looked at it and i said that's me the reason this is appealing is if you accept it if you surrender to it the feeling can be quite ecstatic because after the walls of the ego come down you have this sense of merging with the cosmos or with nature or with other people after i did describe this in my book how to change your mind i heard from underground guides that everybody was asking for ego death it doesn't always happen but when it does it's it's one of the more interesting life experiences you can have at madame alexa10 asks serious question how does microdosing work how often do you do it and around how much so micro dosing is the practice of using tiny doses of psychedelics like lsd or psilocybin essentially one tenth of what would be a normal dose you're not supposed to feel it it's just kind of sub-perceptual and many people believe that it improves their well-being their productivity their creativity but it's important to state that we really have no idea if this is true the placebo effect is very powerful with all drugs and it's particularly powerful in the case of psychedelics which we impute so much magic and power to at shepsworth bentley asks why does dmt cause geometric hallucinations as opposed to acid or shrooms which are a bit more subtle and flowy timothy leary spoke a lot about set and setting set is your expectations going into a psychedelic experience setting is the physical setting you're in so on ayahuasca which we associate with the amazon and the jungle people are constantly seeing cobras and panthers and and things like that i tend to think it's not the medicine or the drug so much as the expectation that our experience is really shaped by what we expect to see and if you have an organic drug like magic mushrooms then the imagery is probably going to be much more natural than if you have a synthetic drug where people tend to see more geometry and human created shapes but i have to say it's probably all in your head at kelly rec asks how does hashtag lsd affect those with hashtag schizophrenia well in general it's not advisable if you have schizophrenia to take a psychedelic and in the current research people at any risk for schizophrenia are excluded the thinking being that it would make your condition worse but nobody really knows for sure in general though psychedelics introduce a certain amount of entropy or chaos into mental functioning that is very valuable if you're locked in with an addiction or obsessive thinking or depression all of which are the products of very rigid fixed thought on the other side of the spectrum though you have people with schizophrenia whose brains are already heavily disordered and they probably don't need any more disorder that at least is one theory but there's a lot more research to be done in this area at jackedu3124851 asks how do psychedelics help anxiety they make you forget wtf so one of the most promising and moving uses of psychedelics beginning in the 50s and 60s and continuing recently has been in giving them psilocybins specifically to cancer patients and i've interviewed many of these people and they have the most moving stories to tell about how a single experience on psilocybin allowed them to confront their mortality confront their cancer in many cases and it actually lifted their completely removed the anxiety they felt about the prospect of death allowing them to die with with peace and equanimity and what a gift this is we have so little to offer people in that situation you know normally we give them morphine to deal with pain or dull their experience of things here is something that sharpens their experience helps them explore their predicament and for reasons we don't totally understand reconciles many of them to death at hd south africa asks can hashtag ayahuasca treat substance hashtag addiction i'm researching firsthand there's been some research done in brazil to test ayahuasca as a treatment for depression but i don't know of work specifically with addiction that said most of the psychedelics appear to be helpful in treating addiction and so there's some reason to believe that it might work let's see what you find out hd south africa at drug bot anyone have experience with dmt entities so this is a very curious phenomenon of the dmt experience specifically many people report that they see these little elf-like creatures sometimes they're called machine elves or just elves and they're very friendly and they're little and they're very welcoming and it's one of the more kind of common bits of imagery on this particular psychedelic terence mckenna who was kind of a philosopher of psychedelics a few decades ago popularized the notion to test this idea it would be important to find a population of people who have never heard this theory of machine elves give them dmt and see if they see them and if they do well that'll be really weird at 8a 8n 8g asks how are psychedelics medically used for addiction therapy yet they're a schedule 1 drug make it make sense well it doesn't entirely make sense a schedule one drug is the is a category in the federal drug laws that means that a drug has no accepted medical use and this is where psychedelics all lie at the same time this recent renaissance of research into using psychedelic compounds as a medicine has discovered that psilocybin in particular can help people break addictions it's been tried with alcoholics it's been tried with cigarette addicts and it's been tried on cocaine addicts and it seems quite successful more than 50 percent of the people who tried psilocybin therapy gave up their cigarette habit as one researcher put it to me psychedelics shake the snow globe in your brain and when the snow resettles it settles in a very different pattern allowing you to break your patterns brody supreme asks imagine the first person who did lsd they were probably going insane well brody supreme that first person was albert hoffman a chemist in switzerland and he was working with a fungus called air got that grows on a grain so albert hoffman's job was to look at all the chemicals in air got and go through them one by one tweaking them to see if he could find a useful drug lsd 25 was the 25th and he accidentally got a little bit on his fingers and felt very funny and realized he had a psychoactive substance and that's when he decided to take a big dose and he did think he was going nuts as the effects began to subside he realized he wasn't going crazy and stepped out into his garden and felt the beauty of it but it began with the conviction he was insane at herk's binge a boy do blind people trip on lsd great question i have no idea but somebody should ask them at rebel poet six asks why is psilocybin dmt lsd and mdma being so thoroughly studied but not peyote could it be because peyote isn't so easily monetized why aren't we studying the efficacy of ceremonial versus therapeutic use so peyote is a cactus that grows in southern texas in a very small band of land it contains mescaline which is a powerful psychedelic peyote is used by native americans in their religious observances in their healing ceremonies it's so precious and in such short supply the more peyote we used in research the less there would be for native americans and you know it seems to me we've taken enough from native americans and if we want to do this research concentrate on mescaline the synthetic version of the chemical produced by peyote now mescaline has challenges in a research context the big one is it lasts a really long time like 14 hours you will be done with mescaline before mesclun is done with you so it's a lot of therapeutic time a lot of therapeutic support it just may not be practical would it be valuable it could be because mescaline unlike other psychedelics doesn't take you to another dimension it really anchors you here but more deeply here and now than you've ever felt it also is a drug that you can talk on and engage with other people it has some of the qualities of mdma or ecstasy which is a very relational drug so i could imagine it being used in group therapy at jesustheram asks could lsd be used as a wound antiseptic doesn't seem like a good idea i mean if that lsd gets in the bloodstream you're gonna have you know you're gonna have a trip i would not advise using lsd as a first aid at gator neal jr asks didn't carry grant's doctor prescribe him lsd for depression i remember reading he once told a friend that it was the best thing he ever did in his entire life well it's true carrie grant received psychedelic therapy in los angeles in the late 50s he had many sessions and he claimed that it was absolutely liberating at aoc tweets it is ridiculous that congress upholds war on drugs error barriers on federal research into substances like psilocybin ibogaine and mdma when early results are indicating major promise in treating ptsd addiction and more i'm trying again to lift them so we can pursue the science the research itself is not being stopped because of the drug war the fda and the dea has approved these university research trials the barriers right now are to federal money being used to support this research so far with one small exception nih money has not been available for psychedelic research it's just considered too controversial so all the amazing research that's been done to look at the potential of psilocybin and mdma to treat trauma to treat addiction to treat depression has all been done using private money private philanthropy but really if the research is going to gain legitimacy and scale up as it needs to the nih is going to need to step in and anything politicians can do to encourage that is i think really really helpful the one exception i alluded to is there is an nimh grant that was given to someone in a laboratory at yale who is studying psilocybin as a treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorders so this may represent a crack in the wall and a new opening toward federal support for psychedelic research which is really overdue at this point at katie weston asks why are psychedelics so frowned upon you know there was a lot of baggage that got attached to psychedelics in the 60s they were regarded as really disruptive to society and in many ways they were but their identity is changing right now and that's what's really interesting to watch in that they may help us to address the mental health crisis we have tremendous mental health crisis one in five americans have struggled with their mental health and so we may look at psychedelics within five years or ten years as important tools of healing rather than disruptors of society so those are all the questions for today before i leave you i just want to remind you that right now taking psychedelics is illegal it's risky to your mental health so proceed with caution and thanks for watching psychedelics support

Channel: WIRED

Views: 3,803,794

Keywords: ego death, innovation, lsd science, michael pollan, michael pollan drugs, michael pollan interview, michael pollan plants, microdosing explanation, mushrooms expert, mushrooms journalist, mushrooms science, ott tech support, psychedelics, psychedelics interview, psychedelics mushrooms, psychedelics science, psychedelics wired, science & technology, wired

Id: IBLnSl8Q1NQ

Length: 15min 11sec (911 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 14 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/junco11]

Interesting except that nobody, including Michael Pollan knows shit about microdosing. So just enjoy yourself! Other than that, I don't think he claimed the crown of psychedelic know it all; it was kinda given to him mostly because he is someone with positive cred in the public eye who's been willing to try shit & talk about it. Lot's better experts but who's gonna listen. Like Hamilton Morris for instance. We need a Michael Pollan!

[u/DrGrok]

Thanks for the share OP, was a good watch.

Some real negative and cynical comments on here.

Imagine being mad that someone with a positive public reputation, who is good at explaining things simply, has written a book about psychedelics that is a good introduction to the general public for what is still largely a taboo subject.

People learning about things, researching them more, then writing about them, is literally how knowledge is passed around. Most grounded people who do this will look back at their writings in 20 years and be like "well that wasn't perfect", and will have written much better literature by then. Not think "I'm an expert cause I wrote one book".

I doubt he has claimed to be an expert on this topic either, he likely just enjoys the subject, and enjoys writing, and wrote about his perspective on it.

Imagine being mad that someone is sharing their perspective. What a sad way to look at the world.

[u/verbeniam]

Fadiman and Pollan are the two people I trust the most on this issue. Their financial incentives are the most innocuous and they're not cranks.

[u/cleerlight]

Seriously, what makes Michael Pollan an expert? How has he so successfully inserted himself into the conversation as an expert, when just a few years ago, he was a totally ignorant student? Aren't there other experts that may be more deserving of this spotlight?

Pardon the minor rant. I love Pollan's writing, and he seems like a great guy. But I find it a little off-putting how quickly this guy has framed himself as an expert just because he's written a book about the topic.

[u/earth_worx]

Some of those questions were hilarious. LSD as a wound antiseptic? Damn, son...

Anyway, I kinda disregard the whole "it's just a placebo" opinion on MD. I kinda don't care. If it's working for someone, then it works, and that's what matters. I suspect when we can do more real research into it there'll be evidence that it's more than just placebo, but whatever.

[u/OllieAckbar]

That was interesting, I didn't really agree with his DMT explanation. No set and setting, or thought has ever had any effect on the fractal world you're shot into. At least for me.

[u/eepeepevissam]

Microdosing Q&A @ 4 minutes

[u/jorbelf21]

Kudos to Michael Pollan for fueling the public convo on psychedelics seriously. On microdosing specifically though, his comment misses the mark. He says "sub perceptual" and "not supposed to feel it", whereas Fadiman et al have clarified below...

https://www.reddit.com/r/microdosing/comments/plrxca/faqtip_101_what_is_the_subthreshold_dose/

"The microdose, if it's the correct dose, you will not have any psychedelic effects. This is almost how you define it*, which is: no visions, no snakes eating you alive, no incredible breakthroughs of repressed, terrible things in your life that you didn't want to face"*

That leaves a lot of room to feel something IMO.

In my personal experience... .25g - .50g psilo, I am definitely feeling something, which in-turn produces lasting concepts in my mind and undeniably (to me) make a lasting impression. This is very tangible evidence of long term benefit. (I have posted on this previously). And I cannot see how this wouldn't be considered MD from Fadiman's view.

Bottom line - I think MP has a lot of psychedelic knowledge - for sure - but he seems not to have explored the range of microdosing based on Fadiman's words - one that I have found to be quite enlightening. His interpretation of micro is more strict than Fadiman's, to my eye.

If you read and listen to Fadiman for long enough, he has a very liberal take on what the dose means - his quote above is the most obvious evidence I am aware of - but you can infer the same listening to his conversations.

[u/lt050286]

Who can point me in the right direction in Seattle,WA?